Let’s face it – bureaucracy gets a pretty bad wrap, and most times rightly so. When people are on a rant about the halt of progress, innovation getting squashed, or generally getting the run-around, they will complain about the “bureaucracy.” Governments get mired in it – corporations fail because they can’t rise above it, etc. According to a quote by Albert Einstein, “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” So yeah – bad stuff.
Given how much grief people attribute to bureaucracy and its nefarious results, what exactly constitutes one? Well, according to Merriam Webster, a bureaucracy can be defined as the following:
1 a: a body of nonelected government officials
b: an administrative policy-making group
2: government characterized by specialization of functions, adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority
3: a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy
By the most popular definition, people are using this to refer to the government in general (federal/state/municipal) and the institutions that spring forth from this. Locally, people may attribute this to why we can’t fix the roads, or take care of issues with schools or parks. Nationally, it usually has to do with taxes, health care, environmental issues, etc. When people get exceptionally cynical, they may even evoke Orwellian concepts like the Ministries of Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love, whose purposes are in direct conflict with their names – meant to subjugate the people to the will of those in control.
I’ve have also heard people with experience in the military complain about all the lifelong bureaucrats there as well. My father, who served in the Air Force during the Korean war, would often complain about generals and their love of paperwork, or how they would hold people back from promotions because they wanted to keep competent staff that made them look good to their own superiors. While my father always respected anyone that served, he had a general distrust of people who spent their entire life in the military.
In its loosest usage, people use bureaucracy to define any system of governance. My first real exposure to this was the first time I got a job working at the corporate level. Suddenly, there were numerous HR procedures in place, IT change management, security compliance, etc. I couldn’t fathom anyone that would want to work in these positions – jobs I saw as more or less slowing productivity, getting in the way of innovation, people exercising their control over the workplace in what I often perceived to be trite ways. While I can still find examples of this being true, I’ve generally vastly matured my feelings in my older age.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this during the week is due to a snippet of an interview with Dr. Deborah Birx’s on Face The Nation this past Sunday, mainly discussing messaging on Covid-19 during the Trump administration. During the interview, she was asked about prior work on the AIDs epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, and if any of that prepared her for the politics encountered with the Covid-19 pandemic in the White House. Her response (paraphrased):
White Houses function in a pretty- a pretty bureaucratic way, and most of the agencies function in a very predictable and bureaucratic way. But when you remove the infrastructure of the civil servants, then you end up with a lot more very quick right turns, left, turns, right turns, left turns, and that- that becomes less predictable and less able to manage that kind of response and change.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/full-transcript-dr-deborah-birx-on-face-the-nation-january-24-2021/
I do feel like one of the great failures of the Trump administration over the last four years was the general disdain of government institutions, “lifelong politicians”, etc. One of Trump’s mantras coming into the presidency was to “drain the swamp.” And whether you agree or disagree with the symbolism of that statement, Trump was successful in gutting many functioning parts of the government, leaving many positions unfilled, and with a high turn over rate of what would be considered the “A Team” type positions.
While this may have worked well for Trump in his business life (or at least, his “brand” depending on how successful of a businessman you think he actually had been), this did not translate well for his presidency. Trump may have still been successful with this approach in running for a second term it if the word (for those that might think this was solely a national issue) had not run square into a once-in-a-generation pandemic. During events of this magnitude, you want to fall back on predictable messaging and response, scientific data, proven techniques. To be fair, I think most governments were struggling with this – but if the U.S.A. is supposed to be world leader, then in this way we failed miserably.
And when you think about bureaucracy in another light, there are a lot of protections and checks and balances we get with it. For example, do you really want someone from the Department of Agriculture making key decisions about the nuclear arsenal? Should people primarily with a background in health be making policies about housing and urban development?
While forms and paperwork and waiting may be inconvenient, there is also a degree of solace that comes from a predictable and fair system. I am sure most people don’t enjoy having to interact with the DMV, but image a scenario where you got there early in the morning, took a number, and waited for the next hour. Then, right before your number is called, there is a shift of managers, with the new one deciding that instead of taking a number, they are now going to start calling people based on age or alphabetically. And instead of being next, now you have to wait another hour while people that just showed up go before you. I’m sure the people that just showed up may think the system is great, but you’d probably be ready to burn the place down.
For businesses, there is a lot of protection afforded by HR and other policies of governance. While it may be entertaining to watch people get “fired” on reality television, imagine getting fired by your boss one day based on whatever whim with no notice whatsoever. In many ways, the role of HR today is to help protect its employees as much as it is to protect management from itself. Or, from very damaging PR or lawsuits that could ruin the company.
Without an effective bureaucracy, you essentially have chaos, or a very unbalanced system that rewards those in power over those with lesser means. It may be fair to think of a good bureaucracy as something that makes the majority of people happier than they would be if it was not there, but just a little miserable in general. And something that infuriates a select few people who would like to do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. In the example of the DMV, not having an effective system in place is maybe the difference of waiting a few hours, which is maddening, but generally low stakes in the long run. But, with something like COVID-19, not having consistency in messaging and procedures could (and arguably probably has) made the difference in ten of thousands of lives.
That is not to say that the struggle against inefficiency isn’t a real thing, and that there aren’t plenty of people that get a power trip from holding purely bureaucratic functions. But, the answer shouldn’t be to tear everything down. Sometimes, the best leaders among us look at problems and, rather than saying how do I make them go away, instead focus on making things better, sometimes in excruciatingly small steps. And so maybe the right question isn’t always whether government should be larger or smaller, since most us will agree it is necessary, but instead focus on how do we make it work better for all its citizens in predictable and fair ways? While we don’t have to love bureaucracy, maybe we all need to learn to tolerate more, and even appreciate it a little. Except when we are waiting at the DMV.